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The “stigma” of therapy

23/9/2009

In my latest post I wrote about how people who see that you are a therapist take it for granted that you deal with mentally ill people. I realize that this association between therapy and mental illness is not rare and goes both ways. If you are in therapy yourself many people seem to automatically believe that you are mentally impaired in some way.

Ask yourself. Imagine that you were in some kind of distress and asked your best friend for some kind of advice. What would you think if they told you that you need to see some a specialist, a psychotherapist perhaps?

Many people would take offence. They would protest that they are not ill, and cut the conversation short. If their best friend was like them, they would back down immediately and would try to suggest something else.

Nothing to cure

17/9/2009

People ask me sometimes what I do for a living, and when I tell them, almost invariably I am met with a look of understanding and compassion. I know what this look says. It says: “Poor you, for having to have such a regular contact with those mentally ill people.”

In the early days I tried to challenge this view. (I don’t anymore).

I would explain that people who go to a psychotherapist or a psychoanalyst are not necessarily mentally ill. I would admit that some of them might be, of course, but even they, I would stress, do not go to the therapist because of their illness. They might think so, but what they really do is go to the therapist because they need help and hopefully the therapist can provide this.

This very simple truth was incomprehensible to many of my interlocutors –and, I would expect, to many of the readers of this blog. I can almost hear, loud, the objections: “If you cannot cure people, why do you invite them to come to you? Is this a joke or something?”

The Unconscious, part 2

8/9/2009

In my previous post I have promised that I will write a bit about how one works with the Unconscious, this elusive entity that is only manifesting itself in our mental lives through its effects, such as dreams, “insignificant” or “accidental” errors, lapses of memory, symptoms etc.

Of course it is not in my intentions to offer an online course in psychoanalytic technique. Rather I am eager to show what sort of interventions a psychoanalyst can make, and how he or she can assess the accuracy, the effectiveness if you will, of those interventions.

After all we have seen that this is what most critics of psychoanalysis see as its Achilles’ heel –that it’s "impossible" to verify or falsify a hypothesis.

So I will try to show that such a claim is based on ignorance if not on bad faith.

The Unconscious, part 1

3/9/2009

Following what I wrote in my last post about the incompatibility between psychoanalysis, as a method, and HPC's requirements for “quality assurance” and “improvement programmes” –to bring just two examples– I would like to attempt to clarify the reasons why such incompatibility exists.

The answer is at once simple and complicated.

Simple because one only needs to remind themselves that psychoanalysts work with what is unknown in the psyche rather than what we know. Freud, who was the first to systematically work in this way, gave to what is unknown the name “Unconscious”.

So, psychoanalysts work with the Unconscious. That’s why requirements about “quality assurance” and “improvement programmes” are irrelevant.

Simple, wasn’t it?

Unfortunately, it is not so simple.

A red herring

2/9/2009

My argument against the state regulation of psychotherapy is still under construction so to speak; several more steps are needed. You could perhaps look at previous posts to get an idea.

But while I am at it, the world has not stood still.

It is already September; gone are already half of the three months set aside as consultation period for the regulation of psychotherapy through the Health Professions Council.

I am very well aware that any last minute arguments will not suffice to stop what has started many years ago –namely the move towards state regulation of the so called Health Professions.

But I need to make my position clear. For the record, if for nothing else. Urgently.

So, let me attempt to summarize my point of view.

The “stigma” of therapy

Nothing to cure

The Unconscious, part 2

The Unconscious, part 1

A red herring

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